Sam Glover
Sam muses on the town of Gorky – the Soviet Union’s Motown.
Gorky was built from scratch to be the Detroit of the USSR. It began in as the dream of influential Marxist revolutionary Valerian Osinsky, who travelled the USA in the mid-twenties and returned with the rigid belief that the USSR needed its own automotive industry. In a series of articles in the official Communist Party newspaper Pravda, he dismissed the existing Moscow-based proposals of NAMI and AMO – which projected annual production figures of 25,000 vehicles a year and 10,800 vehicles in five years respectively – as handcrafted ‘Russian carts’. He campaigned for a new factory and workers’ city to build 100,000 cars a year, calling for ‘every peasant in a car within 15 years!’
Discussions ensued with Ford and General
Motors and an agreement was signed with the former on May 31, 1929. It called for Ford to produce a detailed layout for a plant capable of producing 100,000 Ford Model A cars and AA trucks per year. A separate contract was signed with the Austin Company, Ohio, to oversee the construction of the factory and workers’ city.
The Politburo chose a site – reported by
Pravda to be ‘swampy land covered with small bushes’ – at the intersection of the rivers Volga and Oka, five miles from the historic fortress city of Nizhny Novgorod and 300 miles east of Moscow. It was renamed Gorky in 1932 in honour of Bolshevik writer Maxim Gorky, who was born there. Thus, the factory became the Gorkovsky Avtomobilny Zavod (Gorky Automobile Factory) – or GAZ for short.
Europe's largest car factory
The automotive plant was to be the largest in Europe, with over three million square feet of floorspace over a site of 242 hectares. It was to be fully self-sufficient, with its own power plant and the capability to make everything from wheels, to leaf springs, to machine tools, engine castings and body pressings. Its body shop, Pravda claimed, would be Europe’s biggest building. The city, dubbed Avtostroi, was imagined as a technological Socialist utopia, providing modern living conditions and fulfilling every need of its inhabitants, from healthcare to education and recreation.
Progress was rocky due to miscommunication between the Russian and American workforces, unfulfillable targets, a scarcity of resources and Stalin’s tendency to dispose of people who displayed high levels of managerial competence. Nevertheless, GAZ’S assembly line spluttered into life in January 1932 and output increased shakily each month – from ten, to 136, to 360 to 775. By 1934, the factory was churning out over 130
GAZ A cars and AA trucks per day and the city's population had risen to half a million.
The Ford partnership spawned the Ford Model B-based GAZ M1 in March 1936.
This time, GAZ’S new design department – led from 1933 by skilled designer Andrey Lipgart, who’d later achieve great things – was given a chance to express itself. It added a beefier chassis, four in-line leaf springs in place of two transverse ones and a substantially-updated version of the GAZ A’s flathead straight-four engine, now generating 50 rather than 40bhp. From 1938 it was offered with a reengineered 75bhp Chrysler straight-six engine. An expanding range of Aa-based trucks appeared, plus buses, toys, furniture, aircraft, snowmobiles, boats and some very dashing performance cars.
Realisation of the Five-year Plan
In 1938, the factory employed more than 40,000 workers and production finally exceeded Osinsky’s 100,000-a-year target. Sadly, Osinsky never got to see his Soviet Motown in full swing, as he fell victim of Stalin’s Great Purge the same year. GAZ also lost many key personnel, including its chief engineer and head of production, plus its main political proponent in Moscow, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, who’d played a major role in turning Osinsky’s dream into a reality. GAZ director Sergei Diakonov was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment and taken away in the M1 he’d overseen the development of.
WWII saw a shift towards military truck and tank production, and, in 1943, the launch of the Willys Jeep-like GAZ 67. It was post-war, however, that things at Gorky got really exciting. The city enjoyed a boom that paralleled Detroit, then marched forward as its US counterpart crumbled. More on this and a look around the factory next issue…
‘Ford helped the USSR to build its own Detroit’